Tagged With address bar

Looking up directions on Google Maps is a little clunky on the desktop. You have to select your starting location, your destination and your method of transport. But if you're on Chrome, you can build three shortcuts to get directions right from the address bar, without a single click.

Predicting the future is near impossible -- but that doesn‘t stop us all from having a red hot go. Human beings have been predicting the future since the beginning of history and the results range from the hilarious to the downright uncanny.

One thing all future predictions have in common: they‘re rooted in our current understanding of how the world works. It‘s difficult to escape that mindset. We have no idea how technology will evolve, so our ideas are connected to the technology of today.

We've long sung the praises of Google's site-specific searches, but unless you create a bookmark with a keyword, Firefox's awesomebar doesn't like the site: search operator. Reader shows us how to make it work.

Lifehacker reader Jordan loves the easy browsing that enabling auto-completion in Firefox provides, but found it just didn't work for some sites. The fix? Removing bookmarks with "www" stuck at the front.

Windows only: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP removed the ability of that operating system's users to keep a quick-launching address box on their taskbar session after session. MuvEnum Address Bar aims to address that shortfall, but also adds a few neat conveniences to the package. There's a customizable global hot key (Ctrl + Shift + A by default), bookmarks and history pulled from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and/or Google Chrome, auto-complete convenience, and a key to clear out MuvEnum's history without wiping out your browser's. While Vista has its own address bar option on its taskbar, MuvEnum installs on Vista and adds the same conveniences. MuvEnum is a free download for Windows systems only. Check out its single, helpful options screen below.

The How-To Geek jumps into Google's browser and comes up with a tweak to change the number of suggestions and history items in the drop-down "Omnibox," the non-Firefox equivalent of an AwesomeBar. The trick is to add a preference, or switch, after the .exe in the shortcut you launch Chrome from. If you wanted Chrome to suggest 10 options, for instance, add this line:

-omnibox-popup-count=10

Found any other undocumented command line switches in Chrome? Tell us about them in the comments.

The Google Operating System posts a clever hack that shuttles the power of quick-search site YubNub into the Firefox address bar, making searching through multiple engines a fast and no-mouse-required affair. To pull it off, type about:config dialog into your address bar, then head to the keyword.URL value and change it to:

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Open common URLs, bookmarks, and history pages by title from your address bar with the Autocomplete Manager Firefox extension. Yesterday we showed you how to enable Firefox address bar auto-completion, and while Autocomplete Manager does not perform the same sort of inline autofilling of text, what it does do is allow you to find and visit URLs based on page titles and bookmark names, any part of a URL, and lots of other useful options. It won't be for everyone (I still prefer keyword bookmarks to all of the alternatives), but if you want to be able to perform history and bookmark searches from the same place you type URLs, it's a handy extension to have in your toolbox. Thanks Alcyone!